Ho John Lee’s Weblog

• 15 Years Of Hard Drive History: Capacities Outran Performance | Tom’s Hardware
  Graphic view of hard drive storage density, capacity, and performance over time. Part of a longer historical review of hard drive technology.
  (tags: hdd electronics data storage history trends research computing database)
• Breakout Performance: Laying Odds on Semel’s Successor for the Corner Cube at Yahoo!
  Discussion of a list of candidates in the event Terry Semel leaves Yahoo.
  (tags: yahoo business strategy hr siliconvalley culture)
• Who Has Time For This?: Preventing Identity Theft
  On preventing identity theft through multichannel transaction authorization for credit applications etc, and various service providers and related resources.
  (tags: security personal identity fraud credit finance startups ecommerce)

• Is Iraq really THAT bad? - 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine)
  A roundup of Iraq video clips from YouTube.
  (tags: iraq video war culture)
• Welcome to AltairKit.com!
  How one man reverse engineered his vintage Altair 8800 to create a replica kit, now sold on eBay.
  (tags: electronics computer history antique vintage hardware hacking)

I don’t usually track options closely, but the volume in Garmin (GRMN) calls caught my eye this afternoon. The December 35 and 40 and January 17.50 through 35 calls had volume 10x the prior open interest today.

The December 40’s did 25492 contracts at roughly 8.75, while the January 35’s did 17699 contracts at roughly 13.75. Yesterday there were only 2557 Dec 40 and 2523 Jan 35 contracts open. There’s comparatively little volume in the December/January put contracts.

This is around $46 million for these two strikes alone, and unusual new contracts volume in the other strikes today represent nearly $100 million, so it’s not likely to be a bunch of retail investors on OptionsExpress.

A few possible explanations:

1. Someone thinks GRMN is going up a lot between now and January (perhaps anticipating a good holiday season and/or announcements at CES in January?) and purchased a lot of calls.

• Philadelphia Inquirer | 11/24/2006 | The Economy | Revealed: Why understanding economics is hard
  Economist Alan Fiske models all economic relationships are built from exactly four kinds of interactions - communal sharing, equality matching, authority ranking and market pricing. Mismatched models result in interesting conflict.
  (tags: economics psychology trading markets finance)
• Is a Recession Imminent? (2006-32, 11/24/2006)
  SF Fed memo suggests that the chance of a recession is overstated. “our review of the available surveys, indicators, and model forecasts leads to estimates of the probability of recession that are all lower than the one based on the term spread and the yi
  (tags: us economics forecast market finance modelling investment federal reserve)
• The Real Problem With Hedge Funds — New York Magazine
  Jim Cramer on growth in hedge funds due to pension fund investors, investment banks, and hedge fund consultants.
  (tags: hedgefund investing finance stock market risk management)

Around this time of year I usually review our charitable contributions. This year I’ve enlisted my 10-year-old daughter in part of the review process. We recently received a donation “catalog” from World Vision, which lists a range of targeted donations for livestock, medicine, education, water, and other basic needs. I’ve given her the responsibility to read through the catalog, learn about the various needs, and choose something that we will fund. (Along similar lines, last year some of the kids at her school had a project to buy a cow at Heifer International.)

It can be hard for kids (and grownups) living here to relate to the idea of scarce and/or unsafe water, subsistence farming, or a general absence of health, education, and basic physical and economic security. Spending time travelling in and around the developing world has given me a greater appreciation for the mundane efficiency of everyday life when I return home. (Drinkable tap water, stable electricity, Whole Foods, etc.)

• The Spam Farms of the Social Web
  A look at using Digg, Reddit and social networks for generating links and traffic for spam sites.
  (tags: seo spam blogging marketing advertising socialsoftware business fraud media)
• A Smarter Computer to Pick Stocks - New York Times
  NYT on Ray Kurzweil and the evolution of quantitative trading systems.
  (tags: stock market quantitative trading finance markets)
• Charity Navigator - America’s Largest Charity Evaluator
  Overview and ratings of major US charities, with breakdown of expense and overhead vs delivered philanthropic benefit.
  (tags: charity philanthropy donation gifts finance research reviews ratings)

This year’s Thanksgiving is remarkably similar to last year’s. It’s nice to have a day off to enjoy Thanksgiving day together at home. Emily helped cook this year, so she’s feeling quite accomplished.

• EETimes.com - ‘Teardown’ finds Sony taking a bath on each PS3
  Materials cost for the PS3 is estimated at $240 higher than the retail price. Teardown, with photos.
  (tags: ps3 teardown electronics component semiconductor investing research)
• EETimes.com - Under the Hood: Inside the Nintendo Wii
  Teardown of the Nintendo Wii, with photos and video. A lot of Broadcom parts.
  (tags: nintendo wii teardown electronics components semiconductor investing research)

• Milton Friedman on Limited Government - Google Video
  Old (black and white) 30 minute PBS interview.
  (tags: friedman economics video)

• Boing Boing: Patriot act makes it harder to get real Sudafed
  I keep running into this problem during allergy season. In addition to requiring photo IDs, they’re usually out of the generic decongestants.
  (tags: security health medicine allergy culture)
• HP Q4 2006 earnings conf call transcript - November 16, 2006
  (tags: hpq stock investment finance research)

• JDSU - Presentation at Annual Shareholders Meeting - November 14, 2006
  Transcript of JDSU annual shareholders meeting presentation by Kevin Kennedy
  (tags: jdsu stock investment research optical telecom)
• The Kirk Report : The 100 Most Influential Books
  Charles Kirk’s top 100 books, mostly on stocks and investing.
  (tags: books stock trading investing finance resources)

• Bulkowski’s Chart Pattern Resource
  Collected resources from Thomas Bulkowski, author of Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns
  (tags: stock technical trading finance investing howto resources)
• The Big Picture: Today’s explosion: $4B emini covering
  The huge buying spike at 2:30ish was apparently caused by covering (or unwinding of) 122k emini SPX contracts worth $4B, triggered by a stop above SPX 1390.
  (tags: stock futures markets trading risk management)

• Homemade Laptop Wi-Fi Amplifier Review
  How to hack a bidirectional 802.11 amplifier onto a notebook computer.
  (tags: wireless wifi hardware hacking networking howto)

• Phantom of the Pits (PDF)
  Extensive comments on trading, trade management, and psychology from an anonymous futures trader, originally posted in an online forum and widely republished on the web.
  (tags: stock futures trading markets risk management finance investing culture howto)

• SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » Amazon S3: Show me the money
  Some details on saving $500k/year using S3 to replace SmugMug’s own photo hosting back end.
  (tags: amazon webservices server storage hosting costs business economics startups trends)

• Long or Short Capital » Le Nature’s Disaster - bottled water company fraud
  Amazing story of Le-Nature, which “reported revenue of $275 million to the outside world when it had [revenue of] $32 million”, nearly sold for $1.2B.
  (tags: corporate fraud privateequity investing risk management culture)
• Le Nature’s Apparently DOESN’T SUPPORT FREE SPEECH
  Blogger Jay Silver’s running narrative of his interaction with fraudulent bottled water company Le Nature, which recently filed for bankruptcy.
  (tags: corporate marketing pr privateequity investing fraud risk management blogging culture humor)
• evhead: Knowing when to hold ‘em
  Ev Williams looks at web companies that have had “successful exits” (MySpace, Flickr, Blogger, del.icio.us), wonders if maybe they shouldn’t have been so hasty.
  (tags: web2.0 startups entrepreneurship internet business vc investing strategy)

• Like Visual Search - Find things by Appearance with our new Likeness technology
  Riya / Ojos visual search applied to fashion shopping.
  (tags: search photo image ecommerce shopping riya startups)
• Recognizing Deven: Riya launches Like.com
  Munjal Shah (CEO of Riya) comments on launching Like.com image shopping search. See also his posts on launching Riya and subsequent strategy shift.
  (tags: riya ojos startups business image search)

• Blog Growth
  Philipp Lenssen augments Dave Sifry’s quarterly graph with estimated growth of “test” and spam blogs.
  (tags: blogging blog internet culture humor statistics 2006)

• Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead - Peter Jenner | The Register
  Sees blanket licences for music within a few years, a bleak future for major labels, and the rise of fundable musician co-ops.
  (tags: music media drm publishing distribution licensing copyright future strategy trends business)
• Civilization Watch - October 29, 2006 - Orson Scott Card - The Only Issue This Election Day
  Discussion on Iraq, US politics, and the hazards of the Democratic and Republican extremist constituencies. Card, a Democrat, is voting Republican.
  (tags: 2006 election politics mideast iraq terrorism global strategy trends)

• Nuclear steps put region on brink of most fearful era yet - World - Times Online
  Yesterday, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia told the International Atomic Energy Agency they plan to acquire nuclear technology. Tunisia, UAE, and Kuwait to follow soon.
  (tags: mideast nuclear security policy energy strategy global politics)
• Whisper numbers. (Dismally, as it relates to the economy.)
  An interesting observation - monthly US non-farm payrolls numbers come out at 8:30am ET, but the highly correlated Canadian numbers are released at 7:00am.
  (tags: economics economy forecast stock markets trading tactics)